Take advantage of Excel Power Pivot and enable write-back to your data warehouse

Monthly Archives: November 2014

When Power Query was launched as part of Power BI in February of ’14, the BI community applauded the flexibility and power that Power Query represented. With the current version of Power Query, data enthusiast can collect and refresh information from virtually any data source into Power Pivot.

As the product evolves, we get to see more sophisticated users and they are polarizing into:

Data User

The Intermediate

The King of DAX

The intended use of Power Query was to pull data from virtually any data source ranging from Active Directory to Salesforce and Facebook to Power Pivot as a self-service tool. This is fantastic self-service functionality for most users.

Additionally, the “Intermediate” and “King of DAX” users see the value of loading Facebook, Salesforce, ERP, Active Directory, oData, Web Tables not only to a Power Pivot on their desktop, but all the way to the SQL Server Enterprise Data Warehouse. More specifically; the ODS.(Operational Data Store)

With Power Update from Power Planner, Power Query becomes a complete ETL solution where you really can do Self-Service ETL and not only Self Service BI. The best example is loading Salesforce data into PowerPivot and then further loading this data into the Enterprise DW, without a separate ETL process in SSIS. All data is loaded straight from Power Query, and brings another dimension into Self Service BI. All Power Query and Power Pivot jobs can be scheduled to run around the clock.